Rent to Never Own

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It’s not about DRM

This is not about Digital Rights Management. I’m not against the idea of DRM per se—it can have its uses, as the sales of DVD movies clearly show. This is about something more insidious—an attitude. The entertainment media companies are increasingly acting as if you have only the right to borrow their content—not own, not even license. Just pay for a peek, if you will. Then pay for the next peek and the next. Certainly DRM is a tool that enables this idea, but DRM can be relatively user friendly, as we’ve seen with iTunes.

Several things have happened on the media recording front recently. Let’s touch on a few of them:

TiVo announced it would support both banner ads in fast forward mode and allow content providers to erase content that had been saved from pay-per-view channels after a set time.

The US Senate is quietly trying to enact legislation to make it illegal to skip commercials.

Even PC games are becoming increasingly difficult to play because copy protection schemes muck up people’s systems. They don’t work with some optical disc drives or will refuse to install because they detect virtual CD drive software installed on the system.

Despite all these efforts, illegal copies of games often show up on pirate sites before the actual day of release, and pirated DVDs or music CDs can be purchased for a few dollars on street corners and flea markets around the world. Media publishers often treat these as root causes, when a lot of us see them as symptoms—symptoms of a creative malaise, overpriced media and increasing restrictions on fair use. The next thing you know, book publishers will force public libraries to charge a fee for every book that’s checked out.

This increasing desire to squeeze out every last dime out of intellectual property may simply cause people to avoid watching, viewing, or listening to media. There are only so many dollars to go around, and with all the different activities tugging at people in this modern life, they may vote with their free time and dollars to do something else.

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